While sympathetic to critiques of probabilistic election forecasts by (eg) @SolomonMg @zeynep @ylelkes @seanjwestwood, I get hung up on: Do they really go away? Or just get less attention? What substitutes?
A recent addition to this debate:
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/11/12/can-we-stop-talking-about-how-were-better-off-without-election-forecasting/ …
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Replying to @deaneckles @SolomonMg and
I honestly don’t have a ton of patience for it. People want to know who’s going to win, survey experiments aside, trying to ban people from using probabilities to explain things to the public is silly and not going to make things better.
1 reply 1 retweet 19 likes -
Replying to @davidshor @deaneckles and
People want to know the current score and probability is a shitty way to tell them. Why not expected electoral votes?
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Replying to @SolomonMg @davidshor and
How about the range of expected electoral votes, without the midpoint estimate?
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Replying to @TJ__Murphy @SolomonMg and
How about not adding scientism to unknown unknown uncertainty? The current result is separated by .2% of the total votes in a few states. A few mildly bad weather incidents... Why pretend we can model something like this—rare event, unreliable data—when we don't have the tools.
2 replies 1 retweet 8 likes -
Replying to @zeynep @TJ__Murphy and
These probabilities are generally pretty calibrated! https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/checking-our-work/us-senate-elections/ …pic.twitter.com/LKMgGCKP1G
2 replies 0 retweets 9 likes
Not for presidential elections (every four years!). And given the changes in polling baseline, past calibrations aren't necessarily carrying over that well.
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